treeing

Pluraltreeings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of tree.

   The dogs kept treeing the bobcat until the hunters arrived.

   Treeing wild game takes a patient, well-trained hound.

   Note

   Hunting supplies the core meaning: hounds treeing game chase it up a trunk and hold it there. The verb is usually transitive, but it can also be intransitive, so a hunted animal can itself be treeing when it takes refuge in a tree. A shoemaker's meaning shares the spelling, too: treeing boots means fitting or stretching them on shoe trees.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   A pattern or formation that branches and spreads outward in the shape of a tree.

   Like the branching veins of a leaf spreading from a single stem.

   Engineers spotted a fine treeing creeping through the cable's insulation.

   The crystal grew into an intricate treeing across the slide.

3. 3
   adjective

   Causing someone or something to feel cornered, exasperated, or driven into a tight spot.

   Like a cat backed onto a high branch with no further place to climb.

   The lawyer's treeing cross-examination left the witness with nowhere to turn.

   A treeing schedule wore the new staff down within weeks.

   Note

   At its most concrete, the adjective describes a hound at work. Donald Harington's Lightning Bug (1970) hears "the bugle-baying of a treeing dog," the dog that has driven its quarry up a trunk and bays beneath it. The figurative sense of cornering a person grows from that picture and from the hunting verb. The adjective is not comparable: a dog is treeing or it is not, never "more treeing."

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